Police searching for husband of woman who disappeared four years ago

Saturday

Nov 24, 2007 at 12:01 AMNov 24, 2007 at 7:23 PM

Although officials have not commented, it appears there may be new information that might shed some light on a missing person case filed four years ago when Michelle Yarnell was first reported missing. The Morgan County Sheriff’s Department has apparently renewed its efforts to locate Michelle Yarnell’s husband, Michael.

Joyce L. Miller

Although officials have not commented, it appears there may be new information that might shed some light on a missing person case filed four years ago when Michelle Yarnell was first reported missing from her home in the Ivy Bend area.

The Morgan County Sheriff’s Department has apparently renewed its efforts to locate Michelle Yarnell’s husband, Michael.

In a statement released this week, the sheriff’s department asked anyone with information on the whereabouts of Michael Shane Yarnell, 38, to contact authorities. His last known address is 3964 Ozark View Road, the home he shared with Michelle Yarnell until the day she disappeared without a trace.

The sheriff’s department is now referring to Michael Yarnell as a person of interest. Michael Yarnell may be in the Kansas City metro area or the California, Mo., area, where he has relatives.

Michelle has not been seen since Oct. 24, 2003. She was 28 at the time.

Since then, detectives from Morgan County have tried to piece together the events that led up to her disappearance, hoping to come up with a lead that would put an end to the mystery.

For her mother, Marianne Ashor-Chapman, of Holts Summit, Mo., it has been an agonizing four years.

Shortly before Angie, as she was called by family and friends, disappeared, Chapman’s stepson passed away.

Although difficult, she said she learned to deal with his death because she knows where he was and why, but it’s different without any answers, she said.

To help ease the hurt and the uncertainty, Chapman has kept her daughter’s trunk upstairs. Every year on her birthday, she buys her a present. She does the same at Christmas. Just in case Angie comes back, she’ll know she was never far from her mother’s thoughts or hopes that she would someday come home.

Chapman said she may never have all the answers, but that isn’t going to stop her from looking. The news that the detectives are looking for her daughter’s husband is encouraging. Maybe that means the end of the nightmare is near, she said.

Making sense out of it all is impossible, she said. She doesn’t believe her daughter could have just picked up, walked away from her family, her home and her two dogs who were like children to her. As far as anyone can tell, Michelle Yarnell took nothing with her that October day.

She simply vanished.

The only physical reminders she has left to remember her daughter by are some old letters that she has read and re-read, a necklace Angie had made for her and a few other odds and ends. Those few things that she can touch, along with her memories, have sustained her.

“There’s been so many theories and scenarios and rumors, a lot of rumors. I haven’t ruled anything out and I’ve been on a lot of wild goose chases in the last 49 months, but until we know something else, I hold on to a small, tiny hope,” she said. “I haven’t heard from the detectives and the last time I heard anything about Michael, he had left town. That was quite a while ago, around June of 2005.”

Will Angie be found and if she is, will she be alive? Chapman said she knows it doesn’t look good, but until there’s a body, she won’t give up on that “small, tiny hope.”

There is a $10,000 reward for information. Chapman hopes someday someone will step forward with information that will allow authorities to solve the case.

Anyone with information is asked to contact the sheriff’s department at 573-378-5481.